[OpenID] [OpenID board] Members Login broken

SitG Admin sysadmin at shadowsinthegarden.com
Tue Jan 27 16:23:27 UTC 2009


>Within the openid framework, for now we could just ensure that by 
>standardized AX processes, users can register a CTL of *their* 
>trusted CAs at each consumer - to aid _subsequent_ 
>recognition/discovery of the user's syno-nyms that delegate to the 
>CTL-introducing OP.

This is the Achilles' Heel of the URL scheme (as opposed to, what? 
XRI?), it requires that *first* contact to establish a trusted CA - 
all an attacker needs to do is spoof *one* user at a domain/site that 
hasn't been to that RP yet (this implicitly requires spoofing that 
domain/site too) , and the REAL site with the same URL but a 
different "trusted CA" will encounter problems using HTTPS - it could 
fallback to non-secure?

The risk is nothing new, it's essentially an exchange of "secure" 
information (certificates and their associated data, protected 
mathematically by cryptography) over an insecure line (URL's). We 
know that attackers effectively won't be able to crack the former; 
centralized PKI attempts to keep them from simply substituting their 
*own* data by compromising the latter.

XRI *might* be able to solve this problem, by assigning different 
URL/cert pairs to different entries in the global registry to 
distinguish "site.com with this cert" from "site.com with that cert"? 
Allowing a secure fallback for sites that are late to an RP, though I 
don't know how many libraries would have to be rewritten to accept 
multiple certs per URL - trivial if they accept a cert file as one of 
the arguments, I suppose.

-Shade
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